Abbott holds 8-point lead over O’Rourke in Texas governor’s race: poll

Incumbent Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is leading Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke by 8 points among likely voters in the state’s gubernatorial race, a new poll has found.

According to a CBS News-YouGov poll released Thursday, Abbott is leading O’Rourke 49 percent to 41 percent among likely voters, despite the majority of Texas residents surveyed viewing the governor’s response to the deadly Uvalde, Texas, school shooting negatively and more than half having an unfavorable opinion of his general performance as governor.

Among the 1,075 respondents to the poll, which was conducted between June 22 and 27, 79 percent of Republican voters said they approved of Abbott’s track record compared with 24 percent of Democrats, with 40 percent of independents approving and 60 percent disapproving.

The poll shows a wider gap between Abbott and O’Rourke compared with a Quinnipiac University poll conducted from June 9 to June 13 that found Abbott had a 5-point lead among Texas voters.

Tensions between Abbott and O’Rourke came to a head last month during a press conference in Uvalde when O’Rourke accused the governor of being complicit in the shooting.

“You are doing nothing,” O’Rourke said. “You said this was not predictable, this was totally predictable, and you choose not to do anything.”

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin slammed O’Rourke for his outburst, calling him a “sick son of a bitch” for making it a “political issue.”

The margin of error for the CBS News poll is 4.7 percentage points.